The Number of Trump’s Impeachable Offenses Keeps Growing

In his attacks on Amazon and the Justice Department, the president is inviting a reckoning.

May 22, 2018

In the past four days alone, two new items were added to President Trump’s list of impeachable offenses. He was already a sitting duck for a charge of
obstruction of justice, which as an impeachable offense doesn’t require the
standard of proof—intent—that a criminal charge does. He was also already vulnerable
to a charge of accepting foreign emoluments—at the least for the profits his
hotel just down Pennsylvania Avenue has been raking in from foreign governments, but also for some questionable business dealings by his sons in foreign
countries and for flagrant
ethics violations stemming from his refusal to detach himself from his private
business interests. (Shortly before Trump took office, his “ethics
lawyer,” in Trump’s presence, announced that his private company, now to be run
by his sons, “will
not enter into any new overseas deals while Trump is president.” This was the
press conference that featured stacks of empty envelopes piled on a table.)

And now Trump has chalked up two
more reasons to impeach him (or some kind of reckoning): abusing his office by ordering an investigation of
the FBI’s investigation into whether his 2016 campaign conspired with Russia,
and attempting to punish a specific individual by damaging that person’s
business.

The actual likelihood of impeachment
isn’t the important point. What matters is whether Trump—or any president—is held to account for alleged transgressions in gaining office, and then, once
in it, abuse of its powers. If Trump gets away with these things unscathed, dangerous precedents will have been set.

First, there was his order this week
to the Justice Department that it investigate whether the FBI had “infiltrated
or surveilled” his campaign; second, the president was found to have been
pressuring the postmaster general to punish Jeff Bezos—owner of The Washington Post, whose coverage of
Trump galls him, and who also heads the giant commerce and services company
Amazon—by significantly raising postal rates on Amazon’s
packages. This would damage other companies that ship goods as well, thus
affecting a major and growing part of the economy to the tune of billions of
dollars, but Trump’s tweets and statements make it clear that his target is one
person, Bezos.

In demanding on Monday of this week that the Justice Department turn
over highly sensitive, even classified, information to his rampant Republican
congressional allies, Trump is interfering with a law enforcement investigation
of himself—a clear abuse of power. (This action can also come under a charge
of obstruction of justice. Some of the charges against Richard Nixon also did
double duty in articles of impeachment.) In fact, Trump’s interference with the
federal investigation of himself makes Nixon look like a pussy-cat, but then,
unlike Trump, Nixon didn’t have a Congress
controlled by his own party to protect him. Trump is clearly colluding with
some right-wing House Republicans to mess with the Justice Department, and to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe
and build a case for removing him—even to the point of encouraging the outing of the name of an informant who has helped in previous FBI investigations.

The combined power of Trump and the
Republican Congress could shut Mueller’s investigation down. They’ve obviously
been trying, with some success, to set up key Justice
Department officials by establishing pretexts for firing them or forcing them
to resign. Their immediate target now is deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the
one person standing in the way of Trump ridding himself of Mueller. Rosenstein’s
incrementally yielding to his congressional tormentors’ demands for information
about an ongoing federal investigation—hitherto absolutely off-limits—may be
for the purpose of buying time for Mueller to continue his so-far productive
inquiry, which keeps turning up new questionable behavior. But so far Trump has been dissuaded from inviting the uproar that would follow his causing the firing of Mueller.

But meanwhile worrisome precedents
are being set. Trump’s ordering the Justice Department to cooperate with
certain lawmakers’ demands for information goes against an
established tradition that the president must not interfere with Justice
Department investigations. If Trump succeeds in killing Mueller’s investigation
there’d still be the separate one led by the U.S. Attorney’s office in New
York, but it is on different subjects. So we’re fast approaching—if we’re not
already in—a constitutional crisis that will determine whether a president can
be held accountable by other branches of the government, as the Founders
intended. If a sympathetic Congress declines to follow up in some way on clear
evidence of impeachable offenses by a president, that, too, renders the highest
official in the country unaccountable.

As for the other impeachable offense
that Trump has invited, The Washington Postreported on Saturday that he had been personally pressing U.S. Postmaster General Morgan
Brennan “to double the rate the Postal Service charges Amazon.com and other
firms to ship packages.” This followed a series of tweeted attacks against
Amazon and Bezos, some of which followed stories in the Post that the president particularly disliked. That Bezos is now
the richest man in the world may stick in Trump’s craw, but for a president to
use his powers to punish a single person or company is clearly an abuse of his
office and an impeachable offense. And the fact that Trump is trying to punish
a newspaper by financially hurting its owner is a scandalous abuse of power.

The articles of impeachment against
Nixon drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 relied on a “pattern
and practice” of abuses of power—for example instigating wiretaps on certain
individuals or siccing the Internal Revenue Service on perceived enemies—and
there’s now plenty of evidence
that Trump repeatedly attempted to abuse power, for example when he urged the
Justice Department to resume an investigation of Hillary Clinton and the
Clinton Foundation (the latter of which has in fact taken place). As for the
attacks on Amazon, his newest and questionably helpful attorney Rudy Giuliani said in a television
interview in early May that Trump had acted to kill a merger between AT&T and Time
Warner (which owns his hated CNN), a statement that contradicted a number of previous
White House denials (the White House once again denied this, and Giuliani tried
to walk it back). And Trump’s obsessive, single-minded attacks on Bezos via
Amazon and The Washington Post constitute
their own pattern of abuse of power and therefore are grounds for another
impeachable offense.

Given the amount of lying coming
from the president and the White House (which itself could constitute an
impeachable offense), learning the facts about the president’s
actions is more challenging than at any time in modern history, perhaps since
Woodrow Wilson’s wife governed during a cover-up of her husband’s grave
illness.

According to the article in
the Post about Trump’s effort to hurt
Bezos’s profits, which the Post
reporters said was based on information from three people, Trump has gone so
far as to call Postmaster General Brennan into his office several times to
pressure her to double the rates for shipping packages. While the U.S. Post Office
is a semi-autonomous institution, the postmaster general is chosen by a board that
the president appoints, and so he has considerable authority over that agency. This
brazen abuse of power has reportedly been going on for the last year and a half.
Thus far Brennan has resisted the president’s pressure, which can’t be an easy
thing for an individual to do.

One wonders how this could have gone
on for so long without someone on the president’s staff warning him he’s
playing a very dangerous game. This could have to do with the weakness of his
staff, or the president’s refusal to hear what he doesn’t want to, but such a
pattern of abuse isn’t an obscure matter. Though it’s said that the
presidential meetings with Brennan have been kept off his public schedule,
certain presidential aides have to know whom the boss is meeting with—unless
when she meets with the president a bag is put over her head and she uses an
assumed name. In particular, Chief of Staff John Kelly and White House counsel
Don McGahn have reason to make it their business to know with whom the
president is meeting in the Oval
Office and what the agenda is, and presumably they would understand the danger
inherent in the president’s attempts to bully the postmaster general into doing
something to satisfy his personal grievances. Moreover, if Trump has felt he
could exert such pressure with impunity, what else may he have done along these
lines?

Trump’s obsession with Bezos and
Amazon follows a pattern of willful ignorance. He leapt for a summit meeting
with Kim Jong-un without thinking through its implications. His “trade war”
with China has been on and then off. He went ahead with moving the U.S. embassy
in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and ended up with the violence that so
many Middle East experts (including Israeli military and security officials,
past and present) had predicted, and without getting anything from Israel in
return. His attacks on the Iran nuclear deal weren’t based on any apparent
knowledge of its particulars; he exaggerates the problem of illegal immigration;
he launched a trade war, which Trump had said are “good and easy to win,” without
comprehending the effect on major sectors of the American economy or on our
closest allies (or who used to be our closest
allies).

Trump’s demand that the Justice
Department inspect its own conduct during the 2016 campaign is based on a gross
exaggeration (“infiltrated or surveilled” his campaign “for Political Purposes
[sic]”) of the
fact that an FBI informant was used to sniff out rumors that Russia was trying
to help Trump to win the election. And in the case of Amazon, it apparently doesn’t matter to Trump
that the Postal Service says that it profits handsomely from its contract with
Amazon. This habit of a president acting on bad or no information is a danger
to us all.

A Democratic-controlled House, which
could result from the upcoming midterm elections, might impeach Trump, but at
this point it seems highly unlikely that 67 votes can be found in the Senate to
convict him and thus remove him from office. As yet we don’t know what all the
charges might be, and it’s clear that more journalistic digging is in order to
ascertain if the president has abused his powers in other ways. Perhaps the
Amazon-postmaster general story will encourage other pressured government
officials, if they exist, to come forward. The government isn’t a president’s
play toy and whoever uses that office to carry out personal vendettas should
pay a high price for that. If a president can attack an individual for a reason
of his own, no one is safe.

Elizabeth Drew is a contributing editor to The New Republic and author of Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s Downfall.